Journaling provides us an opportunity to slip beneath the surface of our conditioned patterns of thought and gain original insight into our behaviors and actions. This experience can create a paradigm shift on our journey to understand and engage our lives authentically.

While journaling today, try writing in a different location than you typically do and see what effect that has on the tone and depth of your writing; maintain a point of awareness on your breath as you write; try capturing one additional insight after you feel you’re writing is winding down. That’s it!

Looking deeply past the surface of daily activity, I realize that there is more going on here than meets the eye. The baring of one’s soul, even if it is just to one’s self through writing, is enough to spark a paradigm shift. This experience informs the next, but truly it is all one inextricable arising seemingly made separate when viewed through the lens of the mind.

Life engaged at the surface level can feel hard and lonely and devoid of any inherent point. Yet there is always the option to slip beneath the surface and dive deeply past the riptide that would otherwise wash me out to sea. I choose to walk along the endless underwater shore, marveling at the strange and wondrous life that fills my perception, even if at times that life threatens to engulf me. It is that experience of dying in this moment that paradoxically allows me to experience life most fully.

Such a long journey to get to here, and as perception breeches the boundary of conventional sensation, a smile paints itself upon my face. Pupils dilate as I absorb as much of the miraculous activity as possible. My head is spinning as life keeps swimming and in that moment a single pristine step is revealed. Is there even a choice as to whether or not to take it? Where does inspiration end and I begin? Only in the mind that imagines itself the captain. But having slipped deeply past the surface of daily activity, I’ve realized that there is more going on here than meets the eye.